E-invoicing · Daily operations · 7 min read

Start with the sandbox and send your first UAE e-invoice

Switch E-invoicing on against the built-in sandbox, post an invoice and see it accepted.

Before you begin

• E-invoicing is off for the company. The dashboard shows "E-invoicing is switched off for this company."
• You hold both einvoicing.configure and einvoicing.secret, because starting the sandbox binds credentials. A user with only the administrator role is refused with "Binding a credential needs the custodian role."
• The company is a UAE company with a TRN. A customer exists with a business market, a tax number and a partner endpoint (see Set up E-invoicing).

Steps

1. Open E-invoicing > E-invoicing > Dashboard.
2. Click Start with the sandbox.
3. Open E-invoicing > Configuration > Settings and check Our endpoint identifier (the company TRN). Keep Submit automatically when an invoice posts on. Click Save.
4. Open E-invoicing > Configuration > Partner endpoints, click New, choose the business customer, scheme 0235 and the customer's 15-digit TRN. Save.
5. In Sales create a customer invoice for that customer, for example 2 units at AED 50.00 with 5% VAT.
6. Confirm and post the invoice. An E-invoice smart button appears.
7. Return to the Dashboard and click Process queue now, or wait a minute.
8. Open E-invoicing > E-invoicing > Submissions and click the new row.

What happens next

The sandbox start does this once, and pressing it again changes nothing:

• E-invoicing is switched on.
• An Active Test onboarding with the SANDBOX provider is created, with a callback secret and a signing key. The signing certificate is self-signed.
• Four profiles become active in Test: UAE business, UAE consumer, Saudi standard and Saudi simplified.

For your invoice the submission reaches Accepted with legal state Issued, using the UAE business profile.

The record shows the snapshot hash, payload hash and UUID. Under Payloads, an auditor or operator can download the request XML; it carries urn:peppol:pint:billing-1@ae-1.

Try the other sandbox behaviours

Open E-invoicing > Configuration > Providers, open SANDBOX and click Sandbox behaviour. Type one of accept, reject, timeout_after_accept, unavailable or async. The next sends follow that mode, so you can practise rejections, timeouts and outages. No second person is needed for this change. Typing anything else gives "Choose one of: accept, reject, timeout_after_accept, unavailable, async."

Good to know

• Posting still works if the sandbox is down; the submission waits in the queue.
• The sandbox accepts documents without checking them against the official authority schemas. A successful sandbox result is not certification.
• Switching E-invoicing off in Settings stops new submissions and the background worker for the company. Earlier submissions stay.